How Do I Extend Simple Volume With Spanned Volume on Windows?

What is simple volume and spanned volume?

Before figuring out what is a simple volume and a spanned volume, we need to understand what is dynamic disk. Dynamic disk is an attribute of disk, and our commonly used disk attribute is basic disk, basic disks only allow partitioning on the same disk.

However, the dynamic disk does not have the concept of partition, it is named after "volume". The same partition can only exist on one disk, but the same volume can span up to 32 disks. Dynamic disks are divided into simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID5 volumes. 

● Simple Volume: It consists of unallocated space from a single disk. You can extend a simple volume to unallocated space on the same disk or additional disks. If a simple volume is extended across multiple disks, it will become a spanned volume.
● Spanned Volume: It is made up of unallocated space from multiple disks. The volume size of each disk can be different. Spanned volume requires at least two disks but doesn’t provide fault tolerance, and you can use 32 disks at most. As long as use the unallocated space of different dynamic disk to extend a simple volume, it will become a spanned volume.

Next, I will show you how to extend simple volume with spanned volume.

How to extend simple volume with spanned volume easily

AOMEI Partition Assistant Server is a professional dynamic disk management software that supports Windows 11/10/8/7 and is suitable for rookies. It can help you manage dynamic disks and extend/shrink/move/format/delete volumes easily.

In addition, you can also use this software to convert dynamic disk to GPT without losing data, convert basic disk to dynamic disk, convert dynamic disk to basic and more. 

Please download the demo for a free trial and follow the detailed steps.

Step 1. Download and install. Right-click the target disk, and choose “Dynamic Disk Manager”.

Step 2. In the main window of the AOMEI Dynamic Disk Manager Server, we could get the local dynamic disk information like below.

Step 3. If we want to extend simple volume I: with spanned volume. We can right-click I: simple volume and choose the “Resize/Move Volume” option to get the new operating Window, drag the size you want to extend.(If there is no unallocated space on another dynamic disk, you can delete some volumes with more free space to obtain unallocated space.)

Step 4. For example, when dragging the expansion space to the maximum, we can preview the changes in advance. Change the simple volume to a spanned volume with unallocated space.

Step 5. The last step is to confirm the operation in the "View pending operations" box and select "Submit" on the toolbar. After waiting a few minutes and rebooting, you have successfully converted the simple volume to spanned.

Conclusion

Through the above steps, I believe you should know how to extend simple volume with spanned volume. Using AOMEI Partition Assistant Server will greatly reduce the difficulty of your operation.

In addition to the AOMEI Partition Assistant Sever, we also have the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, which is specially designed for personal to manage dynamic disk storage environments to operate in Windows 7/8/10/11 (32-bit and 64-bit) to achieve the best performance. If you are a corporate user, please turn to Unlimited Edition.